Synopsis

David Susskind's Emmy-winning production of Tennessee Williams' play sees Katharine Hepburn cast as tough matriarch Amanda Wingfield. Set in St Louis during 1937, Amanda and her grown-up children now live in a tenement block but she is stuck in a fantasy full of her memories of pre-Depression Southern belles and gentlemen callers. Her son Tom (Sam Waterston) would give anything to escape his mother's fantasy world, but he is the breadwinner since his father abandoned them; whilst his painfully-shy sister Laura (Joanna Miles) is trying to escape her feelings of inadequacy. Looking for good-fortune and happiness, the threesome's lives are transformed one evening when, after much cajoling from his mother, Tom invites his co-worker Jim O'Connor (Michael Moriarty) to dinner in the hope that a romance may bloom between Jim and Laura.